The Panama Deception

The award-winning video documentary The Panama Deception is highly controversial: some of its assertions have been indirectly attacked by the U.S. Congress House Armed Services Investigative Subcommittee. Right-wing newspaper columnists – and a few liberals – have called it propaganda. And the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences gave it an Oscar this April for best documentary film.

The Panama Deception takes on the “official” line about the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama. Dubbed “Operation Just Cause,” President Bush and the U.S. military insisted that the invasion was a necessary police action taken to arrest Manuel Noriega for drug dealing.

According to the U.S. government, the invasion successfully reinstated democratic rule in Panama, causing only minimal casualties in the process. The U.S. Army claimed to have ended Panama’s role as a banking center by the Colombian drug cartel. (The Army also had to admit that its troops couldn’t tell the difference between cocaine and tortilla flour.)

These facts are disputed by a wide variety of sources. Many human rights organizations have placed Panamanian civilian death toll at anywhere from 3,000 to 10,000 people. Mass graves dug by the U.S. Army are still in the process of being discovered and searched. The largest ghetto in Panama City was destroyed by invading U.S. forces.

And, as many reporters have recently pointed out, drug-dealing and money-laundering are still big business in Panama. The only difference, according to some, is that Noriega ran a tighter ship.

But The Panama Deception goes even further. It argues that the invasion was a calculated plan to renege on the Panama Canal Treaty negotiated by President Carter and former Panamanian leader Gen. Omar Torrijos. It also suggests CIA involvement in the mysterious plane crash that killed Torrijos – and helped bring to power “The Company’s” good pal, Noriega.

The director of The Panama Deception is Barbara Trent, who previously produced Coverup: Behind the Iran-Contra Affair. Trent is an activist, and her documentaries make no claim to objectivity. In a sense, the propaganda charge is true – Trent is fully intent on arguing her case.

And much of the video is thoroughly convincing. With eye-witness interviews and rarely shown footage of the actual invasion, Trent exposes the basic brutality that has become a substitute for diplomacy.

In spite of its occasionally shrill tone – found mostly in the over-bearing narration by Elizabeth Montgomery – The Panama Deception is a hot and critically important piece of work.